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If you share your PC with others or let friends use it when they come to visit, you may find settings changed, files deleted, programs installed etc. when you next use it. With previous versions of Windows, I’ve used Windows Steady State, which provided a mode to allow access without setting complicated policies to protect your settings. Thankfully with Windows 7, Microsoft has made this level of protection much more readily accessible. Learn, in this guide how to set up a Guest account—available in all Windows 7 and 8 versions—for infrequent users of your PC.

If you store photos on your home PC and don’t back them up, I really recommend you do. Hard drives fail all the time yet I still get many emails and PMs asking for help with data recovery. Even if you use an online backup solution, I still recommend taking an inexpensive local backup on optical media periodically.

I have my photos synced on two hard drives at home, on a remote server (RAID 10), and with a third-party storage provider. I’m still paranoid about losing my life’s memories in photos so I like to take a snapshot of my photo data every two years. By making a biannual backup, you’ll always have 3-5 viable sets of discs (they don’t last forever) with your important files—should you ever lose or overwrite them. Hopefully this guide is helpful and gives you something to do with the remaining 88 of the 100 DVDs you purchased on sale three years ago…

Just like your smartphone, Windows 7 also checks the internet for the correct date and time and keeps your system updated with the correct time. Windows 7 periodically connects to online time servers to check for the correct time and updates yours system’s time accordingly. While this all works great, the only glitch is that Microsoft supplied time servers are overloaded (owing to the fact that millions of users worldwide use Microsoft Windows) and sometimes do not respond. What you can do is that you can set Windows to use some publicly available better time servers that respond quickly and provide the correct time.

To change the time servers in Windows 7, you will have to open the Date and Time settings. You can open them by right-clicking on the date and time being shown in the bottom-right corner of your screen and selecting Adjust date/time from the context menu. In the Date and Time settings window, select Internet Time tab and then click on the Change Settings button.

If you use your laptop or tablet on battery power, you’ll know how annoying it is to lose battery power at the “worst time”. While I can’t guarantee your PC will lose power at a more convenient time, I can offer 14 ways to improve your battery life. Learn, in this guide, how to save power when running on batteries.

Note: This guide is written for Windows 7 but most tips apply for Windows Vista

Having the whole operating system on disc isn’t necessary if you just need to repair your Windows installation. Recovering or repairing your current installation of Windows is favorable because most recovery software that comes with brand name PCs will wipe your PC back to factory settings.You should have a repair disc on hand to deal with the following situations:

You’ve made a change to your PC and it now won’t boot into Windows

You get a message such as NTLDR is missing but your hard drive has not failed

You get a virus on your PC and need command line access to fix the issue

Windows starts to boot and then your PC power cycles

In this guide:

How to make a Windows 7 repair disc yourself

How to make a Windows 7 repair USB drive

How to boot from a disc/USB drive and use it to repair your PC

Note: A repair disc cannot be used to install Windows and provides no functionality beyond that of a Windows installation disc. If you already have an installation disc, you can use that for system recovery.

If you’re using an SSD, there are a few things you can do to extend its life. One of the things you can do is move the search index cache.

The Search Index I/O activity can take a considerable toll on your system drive by keeping it busy. If you have an SSD, this may reduce its life. By moving the index to a separate drive, you can increase overall performance of your PC (more noticeable under load) and preserve the life of your SSD.